Education

The Government will release a Mental Health Green Paper that is set to improve access to mental health support at both school and college.

The new initiative includes a £300m investment over the next three years by the Departments of Health and Education. The aim is to provide further training for mental health professionals in schools, create a four-week waiting time for NHS children in need of support and a compulsory curriculum addressing mental health well-being.

The Government’s strategy is to prevent and address mental health issues as early as possible. Both the Education and the Health Secretary have emphasised the importance to of engaging with schools for early prevention:

Around half of all mental illness starts before the age of 14, so it is vital children get support as they need it- in the classroom

Jeremy Hunt

It’s about more expertise on the doorstep for schools, better organisation between schools and the health service and improving the waiting time steadily so that young people can get faster care

Justine Greening

The announcement comes in the wake of a new report released by the Children’s Commissioner, indicating that we are in a ‘epidemic of anxiety’ as numbers of children receiving psychiatric treatment has risen drastically within one year. There were a total of 328,000 NHS psychiatry outpatient appointments for children in 2016/17, which is a significant increase from 241,000 in the year before.

Campaigners for mental health, have said that whilst the government’s announcement is “only a start” they welcome the initiative.

The Telegraph has reported that until relatively recently, a pupil’s behaviour at school was recorded by the simple process of a teacher putting pen to paper. In extremis, the parents would be summoned in person and appraised of their child’s misdemeanours. But paper, it seems, is fast falling out of fashion.

As the creeping domination of our lives by smartphones proceeds unchecked, its spread to schools was always inevitable. And so today, in lieu of the outmoded report card, a growing number of parents now receive alerts about the minutiae of their child’s performance via their phones, often multiple times throughout the day.

Some 70 per cent of UK schools have apparently signed up to one app in particular, ClassDojo, which updates parents throughout the day, not only about how their children are behaving but also by sharing photos and videos of “wonderful classroom moments.” Another online system with a pupil-tracking function, Go 4 Schools, serves to “capture, analyse and share classroom data in real time”. An app is currently in development, which will include live alerts about student absences, among other things.